Psychologist fears child help may be denied

Press, 4 June 1988, Page 1

Psychologist fears child help may be denied

By

JENNY LONG

Many children needing specialist help from psychologists or speech therapists will be denied that help if the Picot report is implemented, says the president of the Psychological Services Association, Dr Dennis Standring. Dr Standring said yesterday that the recommendation that specialists should generate 60 per cent of their income through direct employment at schools, rather than being fully funded through the Education Department, meant that children would suffer.

Dr Standring was in Christchurch yesterday as part of his work as the Canterbury district psychologist in the Education Department. He said some children needed many hours of help, and the only way to ensure that was for the service to be fully Governmentfunded.

Otherwise, if schools or par-

ents had to pay hourly rates for specialist services, they would pay for fewer hours, or look for quick “cook-book” solutions on problems from bed-wetting to sexual abuse.

Under the system envisaged in the Picot report, a school’s board of trustees would have to allocate funds for special services in competition with many other educational needs, Dr Standring said.

“Parents who feel their child needs help cannot necessarily come forward and give full details to the board, because they will not want other parents to know their child’s problems.”

One case which the association had taken to the Minister of Education had shown the value of independent, fully funded services. A child was referred to the specialists, initially because he was having minor learning difficulties at school. After sessions with the child and the parents it

became clear that the child was being sodomised, along with others in the family, Dr Standring said. These sorts of cases were quite frequent, and could need months of specialist help. However, if a school or a parent had to pay, perhaps three hours might be allocated in the budget. The “market” approach advocated by Picot would not work because tangible results in child psychology were often seen only after hours of work. For this reason, many psychologists now would work with children only if they were referred through Government agencies, where payment was guaranteed. A preliminary assessment showed that about half of the psychologists would not be prepared to enter business contracts with schools because of the uncertain supply of the work, Dr Standring said. A real problem of supply of psychological services could

While some larger schools had already approached psycho-, A logists to say they would employ them perhaps for one day a week under the new system, that would leave rural and provincial schools without services, Dr Standring said. The reaction of the Minister of Education to the psychological service recommendations had been heartening, Dr Standring said.

“He has taken on board the comments about the service, and distanced himself from those (specialist service) recommendations.”

The association would make a submission on the Picot report, and members were using their own funds to make a survey and get factual evidence. However, although the Minister had shown that he understood the problem, it still remained to be seen how the Treasury and the Cabinet would react, Dr Standring said.